1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates computer-based techniques for manipulating video data. More specifically, the present invention relates to a computer-based technique for automatically characterizing a video using “curve invariants,” wherein the curve invariants are associated with a curve defined by features for successive sampled frames in the video.
2. Related Art
The recent proliferation of high-bandwidth Internet connections and associated developments in content-distribution technologies presently make it possible for millions of users to efficiently access video content on the Internet. These developments have led to a tremendous increase in the amount of video content that is being downloaded from the Internet. Internet users routinely view video clips from numerous web sites and portals to obtain various types of information and entertainment. At the same time, a number of video-sharing web sites have been recently launched, which are dedicated to sharing and distributing video clips. Some of these video-sharing web sites are being accessed by millions users each day.
In order to access large numbers of video clips, it is advantageous for the users to be able to characterize the video clips to facilitate classifying the video clips (for example by genre) or to detect duplicate video clips (which is useful for detecting copyright violations). Unfortunately, no mechanisms are presently available to automatically characterize and classify videos. Hence, users must manually characterize and classify videos, which is an extremely labor-intensive proposition for the millions of video clips which are accessible through the Internet.
Hence, what is needed is a method and an apparatus for automatically characterizing a video without the above-described problems.